"I can dig in deep to what I'm doing, I can lose myself in this stuff, I can take those feelings and somehow make them into something visual. And that was important to me. Even if it didn't come out (as) what I was thinking, it was just everything coming out of me in a therapeutic way. And after a while I learned how to corral that when I started feeling better. It's like, OK, this is how I'm going to piece these puzzles together. I always think, 'Where would I be?' And it scares me thinking if I didn't have this outlet...I don't know where I'd be right now."

"I went through three years of the choice to be alone. I tell some people that and they’re like, 'No way! Three years??' And I talk to other people and they’re like, 'Yeah, I’ve been single for 16 years. Tell me about it.' Three years was a huge deal for me and it was excruciating at times. But there was—how am I ever going to hear the voice of God if I don’t know what it’s like to be alone? If I’m never alone with Him, I always have noise or something else filling it in. So that was a huge learning time for me. Then I built up enough in myself that I didn’t experience loneliness even though I was alone, and it actually became fitting to add someone to me. I became whole enough that I didn’t need a woman to fill a void."

"I had some dark times with drug and alcohol abuse. There were definitely dark moments where I felt outside of the whole experience. I was left isolated. And that was another thing my wife helped with with—she brought me out of that. Not actively, but through my meeting her it evolved me out of that self-destructive state of mind.

This idea that there’s this source, like a river, and being connected to that, and my biggest fear is being somehow isolated from that or being detached."

"I am still asking myself the reason why there is so much beauty, the reason why we are never indulged, the reason why we are still looking for it, but we are not valuing it. So this is a challenge, a very strong contrast between the acknowledgement of the fact that there is so much beauty, which is difficult to see sometimes, and the fact that it is not valued in the right way."